Georgia police raided a retired Atlanta man’s garden last Wednesday after a helicopter crew with the Governor’s Task Force for Drug Suppression spotted suspicious-looking plants on the man’s property. A heavily-armed K9 unit arrived and discovered that the plants were, in fact, okra bushes.

The officers eventually apologized and left, but they took some of the suspicious okra leaves with them for analysis. Georgia state patrol told WSB-TV in Atlanta that “we’ve not been able to identify it as of yet. But it did have quite a number of characteristics that were similar to a cannabis plant.” [link]

Nokia has a much cheaper offering, but it’s barely a smartphone, with neither 3G nor Wifi

Microsoft, which acquired most of Nokia last year, has stripped out pretty much everything that makes an internet-connected phone “smart.” Sure, $29 is a great price, but not if all you’re getting for it is a glorified feature phone….The thing doesn’t even come with Wi-Fi, let alone 3G, which for most purposes makes it about as internet-ready as your toaster, which is to say not at all. What the 215 does have is a 2G connection. It has to, or it wouldn’t be able to make calls. 2G also allows for excruciatingly slow internet use, so, yes, technically, the phone can use the internet. But it probably shouldn’t. [link]

Much better for the same price are Indian and Chinese cheap Android phones, which seem to be more market driven and less the product of corporate negotiations. These have wifi, and some of the Chinese ones even have 3G

Here’s a touchscreen dual-sim Android device with a 3-megapixel camera (compared to the Nokia’s 0.3 megapixel) that retails for $28 after tax. Here’s a nifty littleFirefox OS phone that goes for $33. Neither of them has 3G either, but at least they’ve got Wi-Fi chips to allow for a decent connection wherever a network is available. China even sells 3G devices at the $30 mark, according to James Bruce of ARM, which designs nearly every processor in every smartphone. [link]

This under $80 market is key, and the $30 pricepoint is especially appealing because it is when a smart-ish phone can be had for the same price as a feature phone. Mirani notes that these phones, while not powerful, are actually not bad either:

I’ve been using each phone for brief periods back in London for the past three weeks, and every one, from the cheapest to the most expensive, is perfectly acceptable… On these phones, you can use Facebook—pre-installed on all of them—or WhatsApp. You can download games. You can email and surf the web. [link]